As the Internet and other online access to information continues to grow, users are increasingly presented with an over-abundance of available information content without effective means to manage it (e.g., to identify content that is relevant, accurate and enjoyable). While some systems exist that attempt to locate content of a particular type and to rank available content as to relevance, such as some search engines, the techniques used by such systems have numerous problems. For example, even if a particular technique for ranking identified content was effective, a system using such a technique would still suffer from the difficulty in initially identifying that content as being potentially relevant so that it could be ranked. Moreover, as the number of available sources of content grows (e.g., content from numerous users that generate blogs (or “Web logs”) that may each have multiple distinct blurbs of content that address disparate topics each day), the ability to timely identify and analyze such content further suffers.
One particular example of an increasing source of content relates to merchants that make items (e.g., products, services, information, etc.) available to customers for purchase, rent, lease, license, trade, evaluation, sampling, subscription, etc., such as via the World Wide Web (“the Web”). It is common for Web merchants to design their Web sites to display content in order to draw interest to items available from the Web site. As one example of such content, some Web merchants include item reviews and item pictures on their Web sites, such as to provide additional information about an item. While Web merchants may in some cases pay professionals to provide such content (e.g., professional reviewers and professional photographers), procuring such content can be expensive, and some users may dislike such professionally supplied content (e.g., readers of professional reviews may be distrustful of the evaluation from a professional reviewer).
In other cases, volunteer users of a Web site, such as customers of a merchant's Web site, are solicited to prepare and supply content such as item reviews or images. While such volunteer-supplied content has advantages over professionally supplied content in terms of cost and of appeal to some readers, volunteer programs often have significant disadvantages of their own. For example, much volunteer-supplied content may be of little use to other users (e.g., prospective, purchasers) for a variety of reasons, such as poor writing and/or analysis, poor image quality or product arrangement/placement within an image, the inclusion of irrelevant and/or inappropriate subject matter, opinions that differ greatly from those of most other users, etc.